OTrunk Activity Authoring and Relative Resource References

[Stephen Bannasch]

If you start an authoring jnlp from an online page for an activity
that is fetched from an online location and edit the activity content
and save the otml locally some (all?) of the relative references to
resources will be rewritten to be absolute references.

It is best if an activity can just use relative references whenever
possible but there are many cases where authoring with the otml
WYSIWYG will rewrite relative references to absolute ones.

I created a Confluence page describing some of the tricky parts for
authoring and maintaining local resource references.

http://confluence.concord.org/display/CSP/OTrunk+Activity+Authoring+and+Relative+Resource+References

It still needs review and hopefully we'll be able to make it simpler.

I also created a JIRA issue to track a feature request to make this
easier and more practical.

http://jira.concord.org/browse/OTK-67

[Scott Cytacki]

I made some comment on that issue below but I think there might be
something that would be pretty simple and get us farther.

I'm assuming the way authoring is being done is this:
- run author link from otrunk examples
- make changes
- save file locally
- send file to stephen, or copy file to svn checkout folder and check it in.

The no programming approach if only one person is working on the file is:
- update svn checkout folder
- run authoring jnlp (there can be one made that doesn't open any
initial otml file)
- open file from svn checkout folder
- save it
- check it back into svn

A pretty simple improvement would be to add integration with the JavaSVN
or SVNKit libraries to simplify these steps:
- run authoring link from otrunk examples:
-- this uses java svn library to check out otml file locally
-- it internally sets the codebase to be the svn repository location of
the otml file.
- make changes
- use a publish option in the file menu
-- this saves the file locally into the svn checkout that was done when
the program started
-- then it uses java svn library to check the file back into svn repository.

Doing this requires:
- learning svn library well enough to do a simple checkout and check it.
- bundling svn library with authoring tool jnlp.

The longer term approach is to replace the svn "repository" with the
OTrunk "repository" we've been talking about.

Scott